Skip to Main Content

Scholarly Impact Research Guide (Matas)

This guide provides information and instruction on the different types of metrics used to evaluate and locate metrics on scholarly impact.

Things to Consider...

Advantages

  • Much broader in scope: includes more than a traditional database including book chapters, posters, abstracts, patents, technical reports, etc. 
  • Indexing is more broad to include institutional repositories and other publicly available and open access forums
  • Coverage is earlier than 1976 (start date of Web of Science)
  • Better coverage of non-English language publications
  • Covers books which better reflect the work of scholars in Arts & Humanities

Disadvantages

  • Overinflated and inaccurate citation counts due to inclusions of Table of contents, promotional pages, course reading lists, etc
  • Can not request or make corrections to your own citations and cited works
  • More susceptible to gaming 
  • Can not eliminate self-citations in citation count
  • Updated less often - Monthly on average
  • Limited search features
  • Difficult to export citations
  • Multilingual and international

Using Google Scholar

In order to conduct a citation analysis of an authors work, the author must create a Google Scholar Profile. 

A profile will allow the author to create a unique identity and then link their work to their profile thereby allowing Google scholar to create an h-index and formulate a citation count.

Create a Google Scholar Profile

1- Click on " My Citations" at the top of the screen

2- Enter in as much relevant information as possible so you can be identifiable. 

3- Click on "Add" to locate articles, books, technical reports, and patents which you can link to your account

 

Once a Google Scholar Profile it is very easy to find the h-index and list of cited articles. 

1- Conduct a search by the author name

2- Select the author's profile

3- On the right-hand side of the screen you will see a table with metric information

In the Google Scholar Profile. Click on "Follow" to receive alerts

Publish or Perish is a free tool that pulls the citation information from Google Scholar but allows for additional control and additional metrics. 

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.